What RFK Jr. Can Bring to Our Public Health System

In Dire Need of Reform

Let me begin this analysis by saying I'm not unbiased on this issue. As a friend of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for more than twenty years, and recently his authorized biographer, I closely followed his presidential campaign - and the ongoing attacks against him by the corporate-owned media. He isn’t “anti-vaccine,” nor is he a “conspiracy theorist,” two labels repetitively pinned on him when he isn’t being dismissed as a kook. The truth is, Big Pharma, Big Ag and the captured agencies that support their agendas are scared to death of what his policies portend - and they should be.

I should add that I didn’t support RFK Jr’s decision to abandon his independent candidacy and join forces with Donald Trump, and I told him so. I found it hard to believe that Trump was sincere about giving him a position where he could take on the money-driven public health system. But I was wrong about that. The president-elect kept his promise, and I hope that soon Kennedy will be confirmed to run the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the country’s largest civilian agency with more than 83,000 employees and annual budget of $1.631 trillion in 2022 (including Medicare and Medicaid, our largest health insurers).

So, what should you know about the importance of Kennedy’s appointment? First, consider some very disturbing figures. Sixty percent of American adults have at least one chronic health condition. Nearly half the population has high blood pressure. Fifteen percent suffer from type-2 diabetes. According to the Centers for Disease Control, almost forty percent of American adults are considered obese, and so are one out of every five children. One out of three individuals are turned down for military service because of their weight. One in every thirty-six kids are diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, a drastic increase from one in 150 two decades ago, and the cause remains disputed and unknown.

Last year, the pharmaceutical industry distributed $31 billion worth of free samples to doctors. The same drug titans spent $4.7 billion between 1999 and 2018 on lobbying federal agencies and Congress. In 2024 alone, Big Pharma put out more than $5 billion on national TV ads, with their sales bringing in five times what they pay for commercials. Some of the peddled products are, of course, government-approved as effective and even life-saving, but the system is nonetheless ripe for corruption and in need of reform.

So is the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates 77 percent of America’s food supply and oversees the safety of almost $4 trillion of food, tobacco and medical products. The FDA receives 45 percent of its funding through “user fees” coming from pharma and medical device companies. Nine of the last ten FDA chiefs moved on to lucrative jobs in the pharmaceutical industry. Do these facts not constitute a conflict of interest? Is it surprising that the FDA greenlights prescription drugs while often suppressing cheaper generic and natural alternatives? Should we be shocked that about one-third of citizens polled say they no longer trust our medical system?

So, Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” platform is not some pipe dream. Twenty years ago, he began shifting his attention from suing polluters to shaking the tree of an increasingly broken health care arena. It’s not made him popular among those who once lauded him as a champion of the environment, but his devotion to a better future for our younger generations remains paramount no matter the personal cost.

Overall, diet-related diseases are believed responsible for half the deaths in the U.S. every year, and cost $383 billion to treat. One way that Kennedy wants to tackle this situation is where the federal government has leverage - with the school lunch and breakfast programs that our tax dollars pay for. Getting rid of ultra-processed foods such as sodas and packaged chips would be a starting point. Then there are products like fruit-flavored yogurt, fortified white bread and sweetened energy bars, additives that often exceed healthy limits on saturated fat, sodium and added sugars.

Amid a series of ongoing attacks on him, the New York Times did publish an op-ed by a health care professional headlined “What Kennedy Gets Right About American Health Care.” Rachel Bedard wrote: “The nefarious influence of the pharmaceutical industry on health care is well established. There are many examples of drug makers funding advocacy groups and influencing regulators into approving ineffective or potentially harmful drugs, and then wining and dining doctors into prescribing those therapies to patients.”

What’s been fascinating to me as his confirmation hearing approaches is the sudden spate of studies, policy changes, and new regulations that back up what RFK Jr. has been proposing. It’s hard to say whether this is a belated head-him-off-at-the-pass attempt to indicate that such things are already being addressed properly, but clearly Kennedy is waking up the consciousness if not the conscience. Look at the following recent events:

January 17: A Newsweek article reported that the Steak ‘n Shake chain of almost 500 restaurants will start cooking its fries in “100 percent beef tallow,” or animal fat, rather than vegetable oil. Kennedy had alleged in October that Americans are “being unknowingly poisoned by heavily subsidized seed oils” that fuel the obesity epidemic. He’d also pointed out that McDonald’s used beef tallow in their fries up until 1990, when they phased it out in favor of seed oils. (The American Heart Association has said there’s “no reason” to avoid them.)

January 15: The FDA banned the use of Red Dye No. 3 in food, beverages and drugs. The food coloring was outlawed from being used in cosmetics way back in 1960, after it was shown to be causing cancer in male laboratory rats. Food safety groups hailed the move as long overdue.

January 14: The FDA called for putting new nutrition labels for fat, sugar and salt on the front of food and beverage products, according to the New York Times “a move aimed at changing eating habits associated with soaring rates of obesity and diet-related illness that are responsible for a million deaths each year.”

January 6: A federal analysis of numerous studies, published in JAMA Pediatrics, concluded that high exposure to fluoride in our water systems - long touted for reducing tooth decay - is linked to lower I.Q. scores in children. The New York Times conceded that “the report’s findings align in many ways” with Kennedy, who has recommended advising authorities to remove fluoride from drinking water.

January 6: A study published in Nature Medicine found that sugary drinks were tied to 2.2 million additional cases of Type 2 diabetes and 1.2 million cases of cardiovascular disease in 2020, especially where there’s been a sales increase in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa.

January 3: California Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order aimed at limiting the availability of ultra-processed foods and reducing purchases of candy and sodas in food stamp programs that are made with synthetic dyes or additives. “The food we eat shouldn’t make us sick with disease or lead to lifelong consequences,” Newsom said in a statement. The Los Angeles Times headlined: “With order, governor appears to be staying ahead of any new federal food policies.” A month earlier, Senator Bernie Sanders had echoed Kennedy in a tweet: “For decades, the food and beverage industry has made massive profits by enticing children to consume unhealthy products purposely designed to be overeaten.”

Notably, Kennedy hasn’t shied from differing with Trump aide-de-camp Elon Musk. He’s an advocate of weight-loss drugs, which RFK thinks should be banned in favor of exercise and alternatives that don’t pose worrisome side effects. He and Musk are on the same page about stopping the drug companies from spending tens of billions on TV ads, which has only been happening since the FDA in 1997 relaxed rules that let those companies summarize possible side effects. “Research has found that the majority of the top-advertised drugs offer little to no medical benefit compared to existing treatments. Many cost tens of thousands of dollars per year,” the New York Times reported on December 23, 2024.

Kennedy even lambasted his prospective boss’s dietary choices. After being observed eating McDonald’s with Trump on his private plane the previous weekend, Kennedy did a podcast interview on November 12 where he stated: “The stuff that he eats is really, like, bad,” Apparently referencing his own experience, Kennedy added: “Campaign food is always bad, but the food that goes onto that airplane is, like, just poison….You’re either given KFC or Big Macs” if you’re lucky, with the other possible options being “kind of inedible.”

When I read these comments, I wondered whether the vainglorious president-elect would now back away from his avowed commitment to Kennedy. But Trump moved ahead two days later in tapping him to lead HHS, saying he’d let RFK Jr. “go wild on food.” It’s not been smooth sailing since. He would need to work closely with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), but has expressed his desire to “reverse 80 years of farm policy” by banning certain pesticides and ending the factory farming industry that he’d fought as an environmental lawyer. Crop engineering, Kennedy says, may have made our grains more resilient to drought and pests, but it’s also rendered them “nutrient barren.”

Trump’s choice to run the USDA, Brooke Rollins, did earn her college degree in agricultural development but served in an entirely different position (assistant for intergovernmental and technology initiatives) during his first administration. According to the Wall Street Journal, her nomination “blindsided” Kennedy and his team, which was putting forward a list of more well-informed candidates.

Recently the Wall Street Journal revealed a disconnect around the vaccine issue between the Trump transition team and some of RFK Jr’s top aides. The medical freedom movement, as it’s called, had been at the heart of the early volunteer base for his presidential campaign. Now, the article reports, “some key players in both Trump’s world and Kennedy’s orbit think drastic action on vaccines would be a distraction and a political loser.” According to one man who helps steer a PAC promoting his health agenda, “there’s this real fear that Kennedy and the movement will be co-opted.”

Heather Flick, a lawyer who worked in various HHS posts during Trump’s first term, was selected as Kennedy’s chief of staff, bypassing a close RFK Jr. associate who’d been his media liaison during the campaign and formerly with the nonprofit he founded, Children’s Health Defense. Also sidelined was Aaron Siri, a lawyer who was the target of a front-page New York Times story on December 16 headlined “Kennedy Aide Filed to Revoke Shot for Polio.”

This was a highly misleading portrait on several fronts, which Siri refuted in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal. In the first place, while he’d been Kennedy’s attorney on other matters, the accusation against him was based on legal work Siri did for a different client, which he says he “never discussed with Mr. Kennedy.” A petition Siri filed with the FDA related to to a single one of six inactivated polio-containing vaccines, about which the lawyer raised safety concerns because a clinical trial had contained no control group and only three days of post-injection review before being introduced to the general public. But the disingenuous specter raised by the Times seemed aimed at memories of the Salk vaccine credited with wiping out polio in the 1950s. Siri responded, convincingly, that “the mainstream media is deliberately stoking fear and outrage about vaccines” in an attempt to derail RFK Jr’s nomination to head up HHS.

That agenda has continued to play out, while Kennedy held meetings in Washington with a number of concerned senators. The latest “hit” appeared on January 18 in a front-page Times article about a petition filed by Kennedy with the FDA in May 2021 that asked to “revoke the authorization of all Covid vaccines during a deadly phase of the pandemic when thousands of Americans were still dying every week….Just six months earlier, Mr. Trump had declared the Covid vaccines a miracle.”

It’s never been a secret that Kennedy believed the two mRNA vaccines were rushed to approval under Operation Warp Speed while alternative therapeutic treatments were shunted aside. And, as Robert Redfield, the CDC director during Trump’s first term, described his support for Kennedy’s selection as head of HHS: “Kennedy is not antivaccine. What Kennedy is about is transparency about vaccines, honest discussion about vaccines, asking for the data to show that these vaccines are safe and they’re efficacious.”

In a brilliant recent piece for Front Porch Republic, poet and essayist Teddy Macker pointed out: “There are many troubling realities in the world of immunizations…..We lack accountability because of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, a law passed in 1986 whose purpose is to shield vaccine manufacturers from liability. Think about this. Doesn’t such a law strike you as a possible enabler of great mischief?….Says Kennedy of this law: ‘So no matter how grievous your injury or your child’s injury, no matter how toxic the ingredient, no matter how sloppy the protocols, no matter how negligent that company, you cannot sue them for redress. There is no discovery, no depositions, no medical malpractice, no class actions, zero consequences if they kill you or injure you.’”

There does seem consistency in Trump’s choices to lead the health agencies which would fall under Kennedy’s oversight. At the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Dr. David Weldon is an internist who also served seven terms as a Florida Congressman. He once put forward the idea that thimerosal, a mercury-containing preservative in childhood vaccines, had been responsible for an explosion of autism cases. (Thimerosal, the subject of one of Kennedy’s books, was removed from all those vaccines in 2001). Dr. Weldon also introduced a “vaccine safety bill” in 2007 seeking to relocate such research to a separate agency within HHS.

The new FDA commissioner, Dr. Martin Makary, is a pediatric surgeon at Johns Hopkins who, while supportive of most childhood vaccines, has questioned giving hepatitis B shots to newborns and a third Covid booster to healthy children. “I think there are questions that we can ask that have been taboo,” he told the Wall Street Journal. Dr. Makary has also been critical of vaccine mandates and other Covid policies, and has argued that doctors underestimate natural immunity.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a doctor and health economist at Stanford University who will be in charge of the National Institutes of Health, gained notoriety during the pandemic for criticizing the lockdowns and vaccine mandates. He was criticized by outgoing NIH director Francis Collins for being a “fringe thinker who diverted from mainstream science.” Makary has called for term limits for NIH officials like the now-retired Dr. Anthony Fauci, and pushed for more emphasis on novel “edge science.”

Kennedy told me personally that he’s in favor of each of those appointments, which do not require Senate approval. The roadblocks he himself is facing, though, are multi-pronged. On January 15, former Vice President Mike Pence’s organization (Advancing American Freedom) called on senators to vote against him, because Kennedy had emphasized “a woman’s right to choose” and said during his presidential campaign that he’d support legislation to restore the protections in Roe v. Wade, which the Supreme Court overturned during Trump’s first term. Pence’s letter deemed Kennedy’s position “completely out of step with the strong pro-life record of the first Trump administration.”

To learn more about Kennedy’s history as an environmental advocate who eventually turned to public health, my 2023 biography The Real RFK Jr., is available through this Amazon link. You can read a recent summary/review on the Kennedy Beacon website. For anyone wanting to watch Jeff Hays’ documentary based on my biography, which I narrate much of, go to this link:

As of this writing, Kennedy’s confirmation hearing date before the Senate Finance Committee hasn’t been set yet. One of the ranking members, Chuck Grassley, represents the corn-growing state of Iowa and in an interview before the election opined that there are ways to “make America healthy again” without “upsetting the way we produce food.” However, committee chairman Mike Crapo from Idaho has expressed support for Kennedy’s having “prioritized addressing chronic diseases through consumer choice and healthy lifestyle.”

The committee can give either a favorable or unfavorable recommendation, or none at all. Republicans have a voting edge of 14-to-13. Which means it’s likely to be favorable, although most Democrats are expected to oppose Kennedy in a united front. That will hold true in the full Senate, where after debate on the floor he’ll need 50 votes out of 53 Republicans in order to make it through.

Listed below are the 27 members of the Senate Finance Committee - 14 Republicans. 12 Democrats and 1 Independent - should any of you wish to weigh in on Kennedy’s initial test.

Mike Crapo, Chairman (R-Idaho); Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa); John Cornyn (R-Texas); John Thune (R-South Dakota); Tim Scott (R-South Carolina); Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana); James Lankford (R-Oklahoma); Steve Daines (R-Montana); Todd Young (R-Indiana); John Barrasso (R-Wyoming); Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin); Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina); Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee); Roger Marshall (R-Kansas).

Ron Wyden, Ranking Member (D-Oregon); Maria Cantwell (D-Washington); Michael Bennet (D-Colorado); Mark Warner (D-Virginia); Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island); Maggie Hassan (D-New Hampshire); Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nevada); Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts); Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont); Tina Smith (D-Minnesota); Ben Ray Luján (D-New Mexico); Raphael Warnock (D-Georgia); Peter Welch (D-Vermont).